Raven Girl: Audrey Niffenegger and Wayne McGregor’s dark creation

The Royal Ballet has teamed best-selling US author and artist Audrey Niffenegger with British master of extreme movement. Wayne McGregor. They talk about their dark creation, Raven Girl.

The Writer: Audrey NiffeneggerThe Time Traveler’s Wife author Audrey Niffenegger is the first to admit she doesn’t know too much about ballet. Rock and punk music, yes – as evidenced in the writer and visual artist’s phenomenally successful debut novel, which has sold 7million copies.

She’s even an expert on Highgate Cemetery, where she worked as a volunteer guide during research for her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry. But ballet, no. ‘Certainly, I was mildly interested in ballet but I’ve never pursued it in that passionate, crazy way that people do,’ she says.

However, the commission from Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor was enticing enough for Chicago-based Niffenegger to put aside work on her third novel to create a ‘new, dark fairy tale’. ‘Fairy tales have shaped the culture,’ she says. ‘Even when you’re little, they feel like something you almost already know. Although the lessons they often teach us are perhaps not the lessons we think we’re trying to teach our children.’

True to her brief, Raven Girl gets very dark indeed. ‘I hope there are no children getting brought to this thing…’ Niffenegger laughs. ‘But as far as I’m concerned, that’s what fairy tales are meant to be.

‘The original ones have this sense that even while things are in the process of working out – evil characters are being pushed into ovens and good characters are being given balls of gold – there is still always a chance that things could go horribly wrong.’

Audrey Niffenegger’s illustration from her book Raven Girl, published by Jonathan Cape (Picture: Audrey Niffenegger)

Raven Girl is the tale of a girl born to a postman and the raven he fell in love with, whose desperate desire to be freed from her human body and become a bird leads her to the operating room of a highly unorthodox plastic surgeon.

‘I was thinking about how in fairy tales things are always transforming: people are transformed as a punishment or a reward, or they’re stuck in between. Really, the drama in Raven Girl is about her own efforts to make herself and her body match up.’

It’s a theme with deep resonances, despite its strange manifestation here. ‘Certainly, if you are an adolescent, you are caught in the wrong body – it’s a question of waiting to see what body you are going to get. I was definitely thinking about the transgender issue, too. And when you look at dancers up close, they’ve worked their bodies so hard that some of them are fairly androgynous looking – that got me thinking in that direction, too.’

Although it was Niffenegger’s previous graphic novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, that inspired McGregor to commission her, Raven Girl is in fact an illustrated novella.

The book, published by Jonathan Cape, comes with 21 delicate aquatints – a type of etching technique that the 49-year-old has been using since she was 15, involving zinc plates, nitric acid, wax and rosin plus a tremendous amount of patience: the most complicated images in the book took up to five days each to complete.

‘When you finally print it, there’s always this moment when you’re totally surprised, either in a good way or a bad way,’ she laughs. ‘Wayne was far more interested in the images than in the words because they really seem to spark his ideas.’

The Choreographer: Wayne McGregorWayne McGregor bounds into the Royal Opera House, apologising for running late – he’d been chasing his whippet round the park, trying to make it give up a loaf of bread it had found. The 43-year-old Stockport-born choreographer is often baffled by the rather fearsome reputation he has. ‘I’m very easy-going,’ he booms.

His choreographies, though, are anything but. McGregor, who has his own company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance, is best known for building abstract works from fiercely intellectual concepts that involve twisting his dancers into violent contortions.

He is obsessed with the bio-mechanics of the body and once watched open heart surgery as research. So it’s safe to surmise Raven Girl won’t look like a 65-minute version of Swan Lake. He’s also not keen on ‘any of that Peter Pan-type flying stuff’ – so no dangling wires.

The piece, as he sees it, is a live graphic novel version of Niffenegger’s novella. He also hopes there will be a third version, a hybrid live action/animation film. But for now the challenges of creating his first narrative ballet – involving video design by Ravi Deepres, stage and costume designs by Vicki Mortimer and a score from Oscar-winning composer Gabriel Yared – are enough.

‘I always hear this idea that making narrative work is harder than making abstract ballets; there’s an idea that if you’re just making up your own world, that’s easier than working on something specific,’ says McGregor, who insists, rather, that ‘bodies are inherently narrative’.

He is drawing on his experience as a movement director for West End stage plays, operas and films (he worked on the Harry Potter movies) for this project. Inspiration also comes from his love of physical theatre by creators such as Philippe Genty, the story ballets of Matthew Bourne, the work of Derevo, Philippe Decouflé, DV8 and beyond – as much as the story ballet traditions of the Royal Ballet (albeit with everyone sticking to McGregor’s strict ‘no mime’ rule).

‘One of my favourite moments in theatre was watching Ian McKellen putting on his shoes at the beginning of Waiting For Godot, which took him eight minutes – it told you the whole play, I didn’t need to see the Beckett after it,’ he grins.

And, of course, he’ll be putting Royal Ballet’s dancers through their paces. Sarah Lamb and Melissa Hamilton share the lead role – McGregor is intrigued by their otherworldly qualities, and their bodies respond well to his choreography. He insists, though, that all the dancers enjoy the brutal-looking tasks he sets.

‘If you’ve got these phenomenally trained dancers, whose job is to be totally attuned to how their body works, what they want are physical challenges, because then they get excitement and adrenalin,’ he says.’

‘We have a really lovely time making things; I think the reason why I can get bodies to do the things that they do is because it’s totally consensual. There’s a fantastic trust and at the same time a real joy in exploring what we’re doing.’